For music I setup a micro pc at my place connected to a radio transmitter. I have a music library on it and set it to shuffle. I can have normal radios around my house, tune to my station, and it’s always something I like with no commercials. I don’t have multiple stations to flip to, but that’s ok. I like the simplify of turning on a radio without having to pick what’s playing. I can also turn on multiple radios and it works just like those fancy setups for multi room music streaming at a fraction of the cost/complexity. Something like Sonos or AirPlay requires a lot to do what a radio could do decades ago.
The transmitter seems pretty weak, to maintain a legal status with the FCC, so some days it works better than others. I probably need to experiment with placement or other frequencies. I’m in a pretty congested area from that perspective. I found a website that suggests the best one based on the city a user us in and just went with that.
I wish there were reserved frequencies for personal use that would make home transmitters better to use. I have 0 hope for that now, but during the era of FM transmitters being popular in cars, it would have been nice if it had gotten some attention.
There's a project called DizqueTV[0] that lets you set up "channels" of media to be streamed to a Plex server, which then lets you send that onto a TV.
It's not quite the same as straight TV channels. But it's pretty close!
I know of https://ersatztv.org which I used a while ago. With a Kodi frontend you can play on TV. Not sure it does podcasts and music though but I used it successfully for movies and TV shows.
Is there something like this? I’ve heard of other users mentioning side projects like this.